A few reasons to be skeptical of machine learning - Julia Evans

I wanted to put some of my ideas together, so as usual I'm writing a blog post. These are all pretty basic ideas but maybe they are helpful to people who are new to thinking about machine learning! When explaining what machine learning is, I'm giving the example of predicting the country someone lives in from their first name. So John might be American and Johannes might be German. In this case, it's really easy to imagine what data you might want to do a good job at this -- just get the first names and current countries of every person in the world!